Bryan Miller

“There was a story often told. Perhaps you’ve heard this one. Don’t stop me if you have, though, ha ha (I dearly love to tell it): Little boy’s grousing: doesn’t like cars. Because of “the pollution,” you know where this one’s going, I bet. The father pulls the car over to the side of the road. “Then I suppose you’ll want to walk.”

End of objections from el kiddo.
Your choice, Jacques.

Dying in the back of a horse cart stuck in the mud? Or zinging toward help, air-con blasting?

Anyone with a lick of sense would choose the latter.
We had.
The world had.

That was what was so damn stupid about it. People forgot the empty larder. Forgot drought, forgot famine. Forgot what it was like to be at the mercy of the world. The Nesbitts’d brought over a charity basket. During that lean period. After the hay burned up, the little feeder stream went dry, Bremer refused to re-up their loan. You best believe I was drooling. Father shot me a look. Move the slightest muscle toward that basket, my young swain, his eyes were saying, you’ll find yourself bunking down in the barn with the heifers.

The bread in that basket was rock-hard and the bacon stringy and the apples home to more than a few worms.

But to us it was a feast.

Whereas nowadays folks padded past climate-controlled cases of out-of-season vegetables and fish from faraway seas and meat from animals who fed in meadows under mountain ranges whose names a person could hardly pronounce, thinking, Yap, yap, yap, big deal, pork from Denmark, salmon from the Bering Strait, loaves of woven bread from Ferrara, all of this is my right.

When what it was, was a goddamn miracle.”
― George Saunders, Vigil